1794 100 Stuivers

In the autumn of 1794, the French Republican Army of the North - swelled by the Levée en Masse that had conscripted every unmarried French man between 18 and 25 - was overrunning the Austrian Netherlands and the Dutch Republic. On 19 September 1794 a French force of roughly 35,000 troops surrounded the great fortress city of Maastricht and its garrison of about 8,000 Austrians.

The French at first lacked siege artillery and settled in for a classic blockade, intending simply to starve the city out. They quickly discovered, however, that the Austrian commander had hidden the entire garrison food supply - a substantial herd of pigs - inside one of Maastricht's huge subterranean limestone caverns. The cavern was located, the herd was lost, and the clock began to run on the defenders.

By 1 November the French heavy guns had finally arrived and the bombardment of the city walls began. Within days a French shot struck the Austrian powder magazine; the explosion ignited fires that swept through Maastricht itself. Between the loss of the food supply and the destruction of the powder reserve, the Austrian garrison surrendered on 4 November 1794.

To pay the troops during the siege, the Austrian commander confiscated all the silver vessels of the city's churches and the civic treasury, melted them down, and had them struck into uniface emergency silver coinage on roughly cut flans. This 100 stuivers piece (Davenport 1856) is one of those issues: a thick silver disc with three rectangular incuse stamps - the date 1794 above, a five-pointed star at center, and the denomination 100 ST below - countermarked with a small civic shield, the reverse left entirely blank as struck.

NGC AU 55 is exceptional preservation for a hand-stamped siege issue - the date, star, and denomination cartouches are sharp and clean, the field carries even, original grey toning, and the smooth blank reverse retains the dark mottled patina that uniface emergency silver typically loses to cleaning. Documented in Dr. Lawrence Korchnak's "Siege Coins of the World 1453-1902," coins like this are among the most direct artefacts of one of the campaigns that decided the fate of the Austrian Netherlands and accelerated the collapse of the old Dutch Republic.